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The time has some for Samsung to reveal its best-kept secret in years! Check out our older blog posts for more about this secret.

http://www.ewebmarketing.com.au/seoblog/samsungs-answer-to-the-ipad

On a second look, the Galaxy looks quite appealing.  It is able to make voice calls on the 3G network, - with video calls as well!  So as a matter for fact it seems more like a big phone, rather than a small tablet. 

With a screen size of 7 inches, it is much smaller than the iPad, but boasts some impressive memory – 16GB internally, and 32GB in the form of an SD card.

The Galaxy is planned for release on the 4th quarter of this year, just in time for Christmas!

The tablet also features a 3 megapixel rear facing camera, and a 1.3 megapixel front facing camera for video calling.  The total weight of the table is 380 grams – about the weight of the old school Nokia 2110 battery (well, not quite – but you get the idea).

And wait for it…. IT CAN LOAD FLASH!!! Woooooooohoooooo!

Prices are still being negotiated, and it is as yet unclear if the tablet will be available to be purchased outright.

Stay tuned for more updates!

Google has announced its intention to release Priority Inbox, a new beta feature aimed at reducing Gmail clutter, irrelevancy and good old fashioned spam. With the modern email user bombarded on a daily basis by messages from friends, colleagues, strangers and automatic robots, organising coherent and applicable responses to the ongoing inbox assault is a neverending task.

Priority Inbox aims to act as a strategtic advisor in the behemoth war of email control, a battle with whom anyone who uses a computer at work is all too familiar. The feature automatically divides a Gmail user’s incoming mail into three sections: “Important and Unread”, “Starred”, and “Everything Else”.

How Priority Inbox will determine the relative importance of each email is based not only on the text contained within the message, but the behavior of the Gmail account user who receives them. For example, if a user regularly sends, receives and replies to emails from someone called Anne, then Priority Inbox will know that an email from Anne is likely to be relevant and worth filtering into the “Important” section.

Better yet, the system remembers and learns from past user behaviour, so the more that someone uses the feature, the better at classification the system becomes. And Gmail users can give it hints on how to improve by clicking plus and negative buttons to indicate the urgency level of each email, as well as set up personalised filters to customise the system to their unique needs.

According to Google, Priority Inbox is scheduled to roll out for testing by all Gmail users within the next two weeks.

Microsoft and Yahoo have announced the merge of their search engines (Yahoo! and Bing) to take on the world’s leading search engine Google.

Microsoft will be powering the Yahoo search capability with their more sophisticated Bing engine, and Yahoo will become the sales force for both companies’ paid search advertisers. The partnership is a 10 year deal, where Yahoo will use Bing’s search technology on its sites, and Microsoft will give Yahoo a percentage of the revenues generated from the paid search results.

Currently Bing is only powering the Yahoo search results in the U.S and Canada, however plans are in the works for other countries.

In June this year, comScare Inc reported the current percentage share of each of the 3 main search engines as follows:
- 64% Google
- 18% Yahoo!
- 12% Bing

With the merge of Yahoo! and Bing, they still will only have less than a third of the search market, so there will be a lot of work and time involved before they stand a chance of toppling Google.

Google launched a new functionality to its Gmail service earlier this week, allowing account holders to make voice calls. Gmail users have been able to voice chat for several years now, and telecommunications service Google Voice was rolled out in the United States last year. Now the two have been merged, allowing users the ability to connect to landlines from within Gmail.

With this latest development, the world’s most popular search engine is set to take on the global leader in VoIP (voice over IP) communications, Skype. The number of people with a Gmail account is reported to be in the hundreds of millions, giving Google a numbers advantage over Skype’s 124 million monthly users. But unlike Skype, Gmail’s voice calling ability does not yet extend to mobile phones.

However, Gmail’s mobile call limitation does not seem to have had an impact on the new feature’s popularity. According to Google’s Twitter stream, over one million calls were placed using the upgraded Gmail platform in the first 24 hours of its release. A far cry from the struggle for recognition experienced by two of the search engine’s previous offerings, Google Wave and Google Buzz.

If the positive response to Google Voice’s reincarnation within Gmail remains strong, it is to be expected that the company will roll out business oriented modifications to target the commercial as well as the private sector of the VoIP market.

Meanwhile, Google aims to consolidate and expand upon its newfound piece of the VoIP consumer base by establishing free Google Voice phone booths in selected American college campuses and airports.

If the service takes off, then Google may also expand its current offering of free calls between national landlines in the US and Canada to other countries.

Here’s hoping that includes Australia.

After navigating to the video of the Samsung Galaxy, a soon to be revealed Android tablet, my first impressions of this new tablet aren’t quite what I had hoped.

The experience reminded me of Steve Jobs’ attempt to load the New York Times on the iPhone 4. Oh wait… The page has loaded… Oh, no it hasn’t. 

Or perhaps this video is actually just of the word attention and some funky feedback loops. After refreshing the site I have clearly found that that:

• Too many people are on Wi-Fi – Sorry, on the Galaxy website, can you please get off so I can connect to the NY times… I mean, so I can watch the video.
• Samsung have created a remarkable new way to subliminal advertise, by convincing people there is video, when it is actually just a jpeg.

After swapping browsers, and waiting 10 minutes for the video to load, I have found that you are able to use a lot of new features including:

• Augmented reality
• Video calling 
• Full web browsing

I am not quite sure what Samsung means by “full web browsing” but I am sure it is twice as good as the half browsing I am currently performing on my PC or iPhone. 

On another note, the tablet has a 7inch screen – slightly smaller than the iPad, and will run on Google’s Android 2.2 OS.  Did I say that this tablet looks incredibly sexy?  Oh, I didn’t?  Well it does! 

The tablet is due to be revealed on the 2nd of September in Berlin. Stay tuned for future updates.

Google have announced they will be launching a new commercial platform, the Google Chrome Web Store, to target the casual online gaming and web application market.

According to Google, it is very difficult to find quality and entertaining web products amongst the thousands of applications and games available across the Internet. Its new Web Store aims to solve this consumer problem.

Unlike the Apple App Store, Android Market and other mobile application stores which take 30% of developer’s revenue, the Google platform will only charge a 5% processing fee from each transaction. The Web Store will charge a onetime $5 registration fee, and offer free trials and subscriptions to certain games.

The interface will allow users to leave reviews and comments on games, to allow others to judge for themselves before making the commitment to purchase. As with the App Store, some applications will be free. 

The apps available (either free of paid) will come in several varieties to suit a range of users. Some will be accessible through websites for smartphone users with full HTML browsers. Others will be specifically tailored for the Google Chrome browser (the Web Store is a Google product, after all). Yet others will be modified web apps that can be downloaded onto a user’s computer or mobile device.

The Chrome Web Store is planning to launch later this year, but developers are able to upload apps now for preview by the Google team. With the company’s traditional emphasis on quality over quantity, we can hope that those which are successful will be truly the best of the web.

Time will tell.

South Korean online game publisher NCsoft is facing a negligence lawsuit for not warning that its product Lineage II was highly addictive.

The plaintiff Craig Smallwood, a US citizen, alleges that he spent 20,000 hours playing Lineage II between 2004 and 2009. During the period of his dependence on the game, Smallwood claims that he was “unable to function independently” in everyday tasks such as personal hygiene and interpersonal communication.

Claiming that he would have never touched the game had he known of its addictive properties, Smallwood has convinced a U.S. District Judge to allow the lawsuit to go ahead, despite legal representation for the NCsoft pressing for its dismissal. This court case is reminiscent of earlier attempts to sue the publishers of apparently addictive and psychologically damaging games.

Lineage II is a fantasy themed MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game), similar in concept to the worldwide online phenomenon World of Warcraft. While it doesn’t have WoW’s legions of sunlight-fearing devotees, the game still has a faithful and steadily growing base of users in the six years since its original release.

Whether the Smallwood’s case will be successful is dependent on whether he can establish if NCsoft had a responsibility to provide information to users about safe gaming practices, in the same way that alcohol manufacturers are obliged to caution against excessive drinking, or the manufacterers of certain tools are required to provide instructions for safe use.

Currently the condition of gaming addiction is not psychologically or legally recognised, however there have been many reported instances where people obsessed by video or online games have displayed destructive or antisocial behaviours.

In 2005, a thirteen year-old Chinese World of Warcraft gamer committed suicide after allegedly becoming so immersed in the virtual world that he could not distinguish between fantasy and reality. His parents unsuccessfully sued WoW publisher Blizzard after the incident.

Google is a billion dollar corporation, and basically controls the flow of information on the internet.  They have introduced brilliant ideas such as Google Goggles (if you haven’t seen this, I suggest you check it out!) the Android operating system for smart phones, and many many others!

The one aspect of this industry that I love is the ever involving nature of SEO and online marketing.  The difficulty of this is the unknown.  What is Google alpha testing? How will this affect my clients, and how can we take advantage of this?

An interesting blog post on Converseon.com shows Google maps taking over! A search was conducted of “car rentals nyc” and instead of the normal Google Maps listing in the top real estate of the page, Google Maps was  the entire first page.

This looks to be a new results page that Google is testing, and normally it is quite some time between testing, launching, and rolling out to the world wide data centres.  What this does show is the different strategies needed for you business to receive leads in the changing market place.

In this example, we can see that Google Maps is prominent, and highly valued by Google. It can also be seen that adwords are still very important, and prominent – as it always will be.

If this is rolling out, or even if the idea is up in the air, conformity is a must! With no organic search results on the first page, how are people going to buy your products or services if they can’t find you?  Location based keywords? Get Google Maps, or potentially be left behind.

Beta testing has begun for a new Facebook feature, Facebook Questions, which allows users to ask and answer questions via the social media network.

The Questions product is strongly reminiscent of Yahoo! Answers, whererin users exchange questions and answers by posting to message boards.

Currently only 1% of Facebook users are able to access the testing version of Questions, with Facebook planning an eventual universal implementation of the feature if it proves to be a success.

Users will be able to ask Facebook Questions in a variety of ways: by updating their statuses, via the search field, or by using a new dashboard specifically developed for Questions. Popular Questions will be able to be identified by user-added category tags for ease of reference.

One might think that asking questions on a social media platform would personalise the task of online information-gathering, with users going to their friends for answers instead of the whole of the Internet. Not so – every question posted via the new feature will be entirely public. No exceptions allowed.

Then again, this is Facebook. User privacy is not its forte.

Beyond giving Facebook users access to the collective wisdom of their 500 million plus online brethren, the upcoming format will present new opportunities for using social media in business.

A brand’s Facebook fan page will be enabled with the Questions feature – so expect to see Coke and McDonalds asking and answering their way to real-time consumer research and viral marketing in the near future.

At least they’ll probably be giving away freebies in exchange for answers.

The Google Wave dream is over.

Last year, Google launched their innovative new project, Google Wave to the masses as a real time web app. Benefits of this new scheme included character-by-character live typing, and the ability to drag-and-drop files from the desktop, even “playback” the history of changes-all within a browser.

Google created quite a song and dance regarding this new initiative - although they did reiterate that they weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically new and different kind of communication.

However, it is now time to wave good-bye to Google wave. Google announced that the program had not received the user adoption they were expecting.

So, what does this mean for those of you addicted to Google Wave (anyone??)

Well at this stage, Google plans to extend the technology for use in other Google projects by allowing the central parts of the code to continue to be available as open source, in the hopes that anyone out there can build upon the existing technology.

Google’s senior VP, Urs Holzle, insists that the Google team is proud of the boundaries they pushed in developing the Google Wave platform.

Did you ever use Google Wave? What were your experiences?